Firefox Has Integrated Brave's Adblock Engine
95 points
3 hours ago
| 7 comments
| itsfoss.com
| HN
Steve6
1 hour ago
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I migrated from Firefox to Brave years ago, and it's been incredible. It's easy to turn off the crypto stuff and turn on more advanced privacy protection. Then it's just a fast browser with awesome adblocking.

My favorite recent feature has been Brave Scriptlets, which are just little javascript functions you can run on specific sites. I've replaced most of the add ons I used with small scripts. Pretty nice.

I would prefer an engine not built on Chromium... but I've lost faith in Mozilla. I'm glad that Firefox added a built in adblock engine, but it seems too late too late. Brave has been awesome, and being Chromium based gives them time to keep working on stuff that matters.

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dlcarrier
5 minutes ago
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It's too bad that Mozilla does everything they can to alienate its users, with failed attempts to attract a different but non-existent new user-base. Without them, and with Safari being run by a company that likes to tie its software to its hardware, there's pretty much no reasonable non-Chrome-based web browsers, so it's the new Internet Explorer, and many web pages only work on it, because no one tests their web pages on anything else.
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abdullahkhalids
40 minutes ago
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The Greasemonkey Firefox addon that allows you to run site specific JS has been around for two decades [1].

[1] https://www.greasespot.net/2005/03/

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esperent
1 hour ago
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Even better now that they have a paid offering with all that crap stripped out (Brave Origin) which is free on Linux.
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pogue
1 hour ago
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Everyone has made these Brave debloat tools that basically do the same thing as their ridiculous Origin offering.

To sell for $60 a web browser that technically has all the features removed is a pretty goofy move.

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cr125rider
53 minutes ago
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Eh that’s a common business model. Pay to get the ads removed is basically the same thing.
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pogue
49 minutes ago
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Well, I'll link to this video review by Techlore.

Brave Just Released a Paid Browser: Here's What You Need to Know https://youtube.com/watch?v=3i5KH0l895o

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armada651
44 minutes ago
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> It's easy to turn off the crypto stuff

I'm living under a rock, but my first thought was that you turned off TLS.

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dlcarrier
9 minutes ago
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Instead of turning it off, you can just make it useless: https://youtu.be/M1si1y5lvkk
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devsda
18 minutes ago
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As a developer, personally I would be worried if that wasn't my first thought when someone uses browser and crypto together :D
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the-grump
35 minutes ago
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If your mind goes to TLS when you read crypto, you surely do live under a rock ... in bliss.
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devsda
2 hours ago
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I hope this isn't a precursor to removing support for other AdBlock addons(MV2) citing native availability of an AdBlock engine and then gradually shift to acceptable ads etc.
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OsrsNeedsf2P
1 hour ago
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The day Firefox drops MV2 is the day I find a new browser. We're already at <1% usershare, it's not like there's safety in numbers here
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pogue
1 hour ago
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I'd be genuinely curious what you could switch to that still has MV2 because, AFAIK, Firefox is the last holdout.

Brave still allows you to install uBlock & some other extensions that should technically not be supported under MV3, but they still ship it with support for those.

Just heard about Helium browser, which is just dechromium + uBlock and it's still beta.

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nuker
19 minutes ago
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> Firefox is the last holdout.

Nope, FF is being infiltrated by adtech for last year or two. Last holdout is Safari now :)

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cookiengineer
1 hour ago
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> I'd be genuinely curious what you could switch to that still has MV2 because, AFAIK, Firefox is the last holdout.

My last hope is ladybird right now, I don't use Firefox or Chrome as my main browsers anymore, and use them only within temporary sandboxes. Without history, without cookies, without logins for the most part.

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el_io
47 minutes ago
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Ladybird supports MV2? I had no idea they have extensions.
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laserbeam
5 minutes ago
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Ladybird is many years away from being usable by a casual human. The hope is it turns out to be a great browser eventually.
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pogue
52 minutes ago
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You use ladybird as your primary web browser? And it works?
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cookiengineer
37 minutes ago
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For the most part, it doesn't. It's not a consumer ready browser, but a pretty nice little rendering engine. If you use ladybird as bindings, it's a bit unstable right now because they are refactoring a lot of parts in the codebase.

I built my own tools on top of it, mostly to use internet websites and selfhosted kiwix archives with my local agentic env.

I guess what I am saying is that I don't have a primary browser anymore. Not a browser where I just can trust it that it doesn't do shit with my data. Being able to selfhost kiwix is a superb internet experience if you build your own search dashboard for it, I can fully recommend it.

Have to merge my things upstream with ZIMdex when I have the time (probably around June).

[1] WIP https://github.com/cookiengineer/exocomp

[2] WIP https://github.com/cookiengineer/zimdex

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zephyreon
1 hour ago
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Could definitely be writing on the wall that MV2 support will be deprecated in the future but imo not necessarily a bad thing if it’s not actively developed anyways. Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.

That said, if this is writing on the wall I’d hope they’ll listen to the community this time and allow the engine to be extended / make it such that a block all ads feature always exists. I’m cautiously optimistic given Mozilla’s track record just over the past year-ish. They have released some great new features that help bring Firefox closer to feature parity with other browsers.

I am a Firefox hopeful and recently switched back to using it as my daily driver when Arc went belly up (but mainly for uBlock Origin support).

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charleslmunger
1 hour ago
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>Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.

There is no feature Firefox provides that is more differentiating than ublock origin. As long as pages load and security issues are patched it is the reason to choose Firefox as a browser. What would they prioritize over it?

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zephyreon
1 hour ago
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I’d like to see more investment in their new profile manager. It feels pretty barebones at the moment. Arc had the ability to link profiles to “spaces” and you could easily switch between them without opening a new window. It was very nice to so easily swap between personal, work, & side business.
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collabs
53 minutes ago
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The multi user containers are also very nice.
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Dylan16807
1 hour ago
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> Maintaining both MV2 & MV3 support isn’t easily sustainable long term when you factor in the need to prioritize other features.

The feature that better adblockers need is one callback that's similar to one that's still in V3. It's not difficult to keep if it's your own codebase.

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striking
1 hour ago
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Try Zen! Firefox fork with Arc-like UX.
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pjjpo
34 minutes ago
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Zen is great and still mostly Firefox. I use standard Firefox on Android and everything syncs without hassle. The experience is so much better that personally cannot imagine using Chromium anymore. Of course I do wonder if the entire Firefox ecosystem is sustainable long-term funding wise.
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gtrevorjay
1 hour ago
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This feels like a betrayal of their ousting of Eich in the first place. I can't imagine a world I would do this and be able to look at myself in the mirror.
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dlcarrier
1 minute ago
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The whole organization is a huge mess that doesn't really want to accept any management.
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Paul-Craft
35 minutes ago
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I can certainly imagine such a world. I don't use Brave because I don't want to support Brendan Eich.
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yborg
56 minutes ago
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>"their"

It's an entirely different management team.

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gbil
1 hour ago
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If this means that they release a iOS version with the same Adblock features as brave then I’m sold. I use essentially all OSs and I want a browser with basic features like adblocking/custom filters on all the platforms and currently Firefox fails this on iOS devices. Still I believe the Firefox sync is much more robust than eg. Brave one , among various platforms. But then I will also need Firefox to fix keyboard shortcuts on Android which they had until the Fenix rebase some years ago and still haven’t fixed since
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MrAlex94
1 hour ago
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I think people are reading into this too much - I don’t think Mozilla would ever implement an actual full spectrum ad blocker (although who knows with the new direction Firefox is headed), this will likely be used as an improvement/replacement for the current tracking protection implementation.

Weirdly enough, the same time this was added to Geckko is when I started implementing the adblock-rs library for Waterfox - I stumbled across the bindings by accident when using searchfox on the main branch instead of esr140! Quite the coincidence doing it at the same time.

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nextaccountic
2 hours ago
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Does this benefit people that use uBlock Origin?

Maybe uBlock Origin for Firefox could be updated to make use of this

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toofy
2 hours ago
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sounds like it just uses ublocks lists.

though it doesn’t seem to work as well as ublock, the ad slots are still there with just the ad missing so there’s a giant ugly blank spot.

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fabrice_d
1 hour ago
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Probably because they don't leverage cosmetic filtering yet: https://docs.rs/adblock/latest/adblock/struct.Engine.html#me...
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fishgoesblub
1 hour ago
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It's surprising, and disappointing that this hasn't happened sooner. A real shame that it took a browser company other than Mozilla to make (In Rust no less!) adblock-rust. I wonder if this could've been a native Firefox feature and selling point years ago if Eich wasn't kicked out.
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